The Office of Personnel Management, looking to fully close the gender pay gap in the federal workforce, is taking a new approach to try to level the playing field for new federal hires.

There are lots of job ready federal retirees out there prepared and willing to return to work for Uncle Sam, but we need to eliminate the biases and disincentives that make it too hard for them to do so. 

Ron Sanders, the former staff director of the Florida Center for Cybersecurity, said companies in the medical industry are soft targets for cyber criminals. “If you’re a small company or a health care company with lots of decentralized franchises or outlets, you’ve got a huge attack surface, and it’s pretty easy for cyber criminals to get in,” Sanders said.

The way we hold federal employees accountable for meeting reasonable standards of performance and behavior is badly broken, and it must be fixed before we can talk about additional reforms, argues one former federal leader.

Create a ‘hostage exchange’ program that requires agency and/or their major bureau CHCOs and OPM’s own senior career staff to ‘walk a mile in each other’s shoes’ and in so doing, shed the current us vs. them mentality

“Help yourself before helping others” — it’s a familiar adage, but it’s also advice the Government Accountability Office urges the federal government’s personnel shop to take.

The Office of Personnel Management is at “significant risk” of being unable to help agencies address governmentwide skills gaps, if it can’t first do a better job of addressing its internal skills gaps, GAO said in a report published last week.

Persistent internal skills gaps “could compromise OPM’s ability to implement its strategic objectives related to closing governmentwide skills gaps,” GAO said in the Feb. 27 report.

Although OPM has made progress in some areas of workforce management, such as creating an internal committee to hire and train new staff members, the agency is struggling to clearly identify and address several skills gaps within its own staff.

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Skills gaps have a broad definition — they can be competency gaps, which are a lack of staff knowledge — or staffing gaps, which are a lack of employees in a certain field. Notably, OPM has reported that there are currently three significant governmentwide skills gaps, in cybersecurity, acquisition and human resources (HR), along with 37 agency-specific ones.

But before the agency can effectively help others address those challenges, GAO said OPM needs to find a way to deal with internal issues. For example, leadership development, data analytics and project management are key areas in which OPM needs to boost skills.

Adding to the issue, OPM doesn’t have a clear “action plan” to address specific skills gaps, GAO said. Although OPM has a draft action plan, it is missing key information, like a list of mission-critical occupations and where the skills gaps are, as well as a plan to measure progress toward closing the gaps.

GAO’s findings, most notably the lack of an action plan to address identified skills deficiencies, were “concerning” to officials at the Partnership for Public Service.

“OPM is charged with ensuring the federal government is prepared for and responsive to changes in the federal workforce and workplace,” James Christian Blockwood, the Partnership’s executive vice president, said in an email to Federal News Network. “This will require OPM’s commitment to identifying skills gaps and upskilling at other federal agencies, as well as its own workforce.”

OPM Chief Human Capital Office Carmen Garcia, though, said in a Feb. 10 letter to GAO that OPM is already taking steps to address skills gaps, including through using shared certificates, expanding the use of non-competitive hiring authorities to reach early-career employees and adding more positions that are eligible for remote work.

It is also notable that OPM has faced significant challenges in just the past several of years. Although OPM’s challenges are more long-term, the proposed merger of OPM with the General Services Administration during the Trump administration caused staff turnover. Efforts to rebuild the workforce afterward compounded with OPM’s ability to effectively address skills gaps.

“OPM is still recovering from the failed attempt by the previous administration to pull it apart and place its authorities in other agencies,” Dan Blair, former OPM deputy director, said in an interview with Federal News Network. “The proposed shutdown took its toll in terms of employee morale, recruitment and retention. It should be of no surprise that GAO recommended that OPM analyze its own skills gaps and capacity if it is to carry out its governmentwide mission successfully.

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Additionally, OPM lacked permanent leadership for two years, prior to the confirmation of current OPM Director Kiran Ahuja, which led to additional workforce challenges.

“Unfortunately, stable leadership at OPM had been an issue for some time,” Blockwood said. “A Senate-confirmed OPM director has not served a full four-year term since 2013 … This leadership void had a ripple effect across government.”

But GAO said there have been recent improvements for human capital, in part because it’s a top priority in the Biden administration’s President’s Management Agenda (PMA). Additionally, OPM has improved collaboration within the Chief Human Capital Officers (CHCO) Council. There has also been OPM guidance to agencies on skills-based hiring, as well as a relatively new remote work filter on USA Jobs.

Even with these improvements, OPM’s current internal skills gaps lead to challenges with implementing some of the agency’s broader strategic objectives, GAO said.

“OPM did not list its skills gaps as a risk to implementing its strategic objectives, an essential element of enterprise risk management,” GAO said in the report. “Doing so would better position OPM to have the near- and long-term capacity to help other agencies close skills gaps across the federal government.”

Ron Sanders, former chairman of the Federal Salary Council and former associate director for HR policy at OPM, said the results of the GAO report were “unsurprising,” but that the reason behind the challenges may be difficult to measure.

“I think the skills gaps and have more to do with intangibles than they do with specific functional specializations,” Sanders, current president and CEO of Publica Virtu LLC, said in an interview with Federal News Network. “So much of this comes down to leadership.”

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“If the leadership doesn’t make it a priority, then these things won’t happen,” Blair added. “It needs to have support, not just within the agency, but also across the board. The CHCO Council needs to be able to support and work on this.”

Notably, poor workforce management, along with low staffing and inadequate training, are some of GAO’s rationales for keeping strategic human capital management on its high-risk list, where it has remained since 2001. Issues with leadership continuity and succession planning additionally contribute to challenges with strategic human capital management.

OPM’s internal skills gaps also dovetail with growing challenges for human capital management governmentwide. For the report, GAO surveyed agency CHCOs to get a broader sense of federal HR issues.

Federal human capital leaders who participated in GAO’s forum last May said recruitment and workforce planning were the two biggest pain points when trying to close skills gaps. Many of the participants said OPM should offer more workplace flexibilities and streamline guidance to help reduce administrative burdens on staff.

Agency leaders added that generally, competition with the private sector, budget uncertainty and differences in compensation made it more difficult to try to close skills gaps. Special salary rates can help some agencies recruit and retain workforce for particular skills, but that could leave other agencies without those flexibilities with heightened challenges.

Many of the human capital changes that agencies currently make are specific to the individual agency, such as the Department of Homeland Security’s cyber talent management system. But OPM is still positioned to target governmentwide reform, Sanders said.

“In my view, we passed an inflection point more than a decade ago, with the bulk of civil service reforms now taking place at an agency level. They’re not sweeping governmentwide reforms, and yet OPM is still geared for the latter,” Sanders said. “Agency-specific personnel flexibilities are going to be the wave of the future. Nobody is holding their breath for governmentwide reform.”

Adding to the difficulties, OPM’s workforce is very “insular,” Sanders said, meaning there is not a lot of understanding between the governmentwide HR agency, and the agencies that OPM is intended to support.

But there are ways to improve collaboration, that may not require additional resources or funding. Sanders recommended, for instance, that OPM should require candidates for management positions to have experience in another agency’s HR department, and on the flipside, those applying for agency CHCO positions should have prior experience working at OPM.

“OPM is in the process of running out of time,” Sanders said. “This would send a huge signal to everybody that they’re serious about this.”

To try to close skills gaps, GAO recommended that OPM create an “action plan,” which the agency has agreed to do. In response to the initial GAO report, OPM said it plans to conduct a “human capital review” this spring.

“OPM will develop and implement an action plan to address our agency-specific skills and competency gaps via selected human capital strategies,” OPM’s CHCO Garcia told GAO.

But beyond creating the action plan, Sanders said it will be equally important, if not more so, to look at the actual execution of it.

“You can make your pronouncements tomorrow,” he said. “Then execution may take some time. But the action plan needs both [policy and execution].”

Much of that action plan should also consider emerging skills gaps. Blair said beyond closing current skills gaps, it’s important for OPM to plan for what may appear several years in the future, then try to mitigate potential gaps before they appear.

“It’s about looking in the crystal ball and trying to predict what might be happening in the future,” he said. “If you don’t prepare for future problems, then they arise. At least this way, you can get a little bit ahead of the curve.”

GAO additionally recommended that OPM document and monitor progress for addressing the risks that skills gaps create.

“Until OPM documents risks to its strategic objectives posed by skills gaps and identifies risk responses, OPM may not be making fully informed budgetary, operational and other trade-off decisions or best positioning itself to have the near- and long-term capacity to help other agencies close skills gaps across the federal government,” GAO said.

The House Oversight and Accountability Committee will hold a hearing Thursday to examine OPM’s administration of federal human capital policy, as well as OPM’s plans to strengthen the merit-based civil service system.

Banning exceptions to standard federal personnel rules could make agency-specific reforms more difficult.

Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va. and more than a dozen of his Democratic colleagues have introduced legislation that would ban presidents from unilaterally establishing federal positions in the “excepted service,” outside the protections of the competitive (that is, “regular”) civil service, codified in Title 5 of the U.S. Code. 

In other words, the legislation would ban anything resembling the Trump administration’s infamous Schedule F. All federal employees  should appreciate Sen. Kaine’s leadership in this area, as well as what he and his colleagues in the House and Senate tried to do in the last session of Congress. I know I do; after all, I resigned as chair of the Federal Salary Council over Trump’s Schedule F executive order. 

However, as laudable as efforts to prevent another Schedule F may be, they could also inadvertently close a backdoor that agencies (and their committees on Capitol Hill) have long used to get relief from the inflexibilities of the current civil service system. We need to acknowledge that exceptions have become the rule, that they do not necessarily mean politicization of the civil service, and that they should be guided, not banned. Kaine and his colleagues should be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. 

Unintended Consequences 

The practical effect of the Kaine bill would be to bar a president from placing certain positions or entire agencies outside the competitive civil service by declaring them to be excepted from the standard rules. It would create some very high procedural barriers that would make it almost impossible to do so.

Yet getting exceptions is precisely how many agencies have managed to gain relief from the arcane, archaic rules that are also included in Title 5, much of which dates back to the last century. They’re the product of an era when the federal government was a one- size-fits-all monolith. However, that’s no longer the case, and anything that makes getting agency- or occupation-specific relief from obsolete rules and regulations harder should be reconsidered.

Indeed, the list of agencies whose personnel regulations are legitimate exceptions to regular competitive civil service rules includes the CIA, the FBI, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Drug Enforcement Administration; specialized elements of the Defense, Homeland Security and Veterans Affairs departments; and banking and financial regulators like the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Governmentwide, some critical groups of federal employees, such as members of the Senior Executive Service and presidential management fellows, are also appointed under excepted’authorities. 

Thus, for much of government, exceptions have become the rule, in part because the regular civil service system is woefully obsolete. And these exceptions have been implemented in a way that has steadfastly avoided the politicization inherent in Schedule F. I know this from firsthand experience. Most of the 100,000 civil servants I worked with in the intelligence community were in the excepted service, and for the most part, we knew how to keep partisan politics from influencing decisions about who earned these positions. 

Agency-specific efforts are the new vector of civil service reform, and an outright ban on them could inadvertently set such reforms back by years. 

Missions Matter

Recently, Jeffrey Neal of the National Academy of Public Administration, writing on behalf of a working group of NAPA fellows, argued that “virtually nothing has been done” to modernize the federal civil service for years. But while it’s true that few governmentwide reforms have been implemented, lots of agency-specific ones—all under the heading of exceptions to regular civil service rules—have occurred. I would argue that’s a good thing, as long as they are properly managed.

Federal agencies and the people who work in them have different missions. They need to be governed by different civil service rules, in whole or in part. They’re all part of a more federated, less monolithic model, and legislation needs to acknowledge legitimate alternatives to guide them, rather than ignore or try to suppress them. 

Two recent examples, both involving cybersecurity, offer a possible way ahead. 

In 2013, DHS received congressional authority to create a cybersecurity personnel system outside of Title 5, but subject to Office of Personnel Management coordination and, of course, congressional oversight. Its regulations took way too long to issue (that’s another story), but the point is the system was specifically designed to take advantage of the flexibilities inherent in the excepted service. 

Congress gave mirror-image authorities to DoD to except its cybersecurity experts a year later. DoD was far more expeditious in exercising that authority and it chose a much more descriptive title: the Cybersecurity Excepted Service.

Note that in both cases, the agencies were statutorily bound to respect merit principles and protections, but there was no attempt to ban flexibilities outright. In fact, excepted flexibilities were specifically acknowledged and enabled by law, with OPM and congressional authorizing committees serving as a check on their implementation. 

Beyond the Monolithic Model

The one size fits all monolith just isn’t reality anymore in government. So, in my view, legislation needs to recognize and acknowledge the flexibilities inherent in exceptions to the competitive civil service and guide them, rather than trying to ban them (and in the process, perhaps increase its chances of passing).

Agency- and occupation-specific exceptions to the standard civil service system—whether they’re partial (as in excepted appointing authorities) or full-blown excepted services like CIA or SEC—don’t necessarily lead to politicization. But they should be guided and managed as part of a broader statutory plan that provides modern, more targeted flexibilities without politicization. 

That’s what NAPA’s No Time to Wait report concluded in 2017, but it hasn’t happened. Indeed, no one has even proposed it.

Exceptions to regular civil service rules are not inherently evil, the underlying political motivations of Schedule F notwithstanding. But they do need to be recognized in law and managed in practice. So, let’s not make agency- and occupation-specific exceptions harder. Instead, Congress should create a process that acknowledges and enables those flexibilities while prohibiting any attempt to use them to politicize the civil service.

Ron Sanders is a fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration and a retired career member of the Senior Executive Service. He served as director of civilian personnel at the Defense Department, the IRS’s chief human resources officer, associate director of the Office of Personnel Management, chief human capital officer for the intelligence community, and chairman of the Federal Salary Council. 

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We need a cadre of career professionals to take a whole-of-government approach to addressing key priorities.

Recently, Government Executive editor at large Tom Shoop wrote a retrospective on the proliferation of “czars” in the executive branch, and it’s clear to me they’re not going away. 

But while czars may have become part of our bureaucratic landscape, having a few of them at the epicenter of the federal government is not sufficient. We need an army (or at least a battalion) of sharply focused career executives who can take a “whole of government” approach to the myriad challenges our nation faces. The good news is that there are ways to develop and deploy such a cadre, if we can just find the wherewithal to do so.

Czars Are Not Enough

Are White House czars even necessary? Is it because many of them can be appointed without Senate confirmation and, in so doing, avoid constant, diverting and increasingly partisan congressional oversight? Both are good, tactical reasons for their emergence. But I think there’s an overarching strategic explanation for their proliferation, having to do with the way the federal bureaucracy is organized (or not) to deal with the whole-of-government and even whole-of-nation challenges that have become our new normal.

Here’s the problem: in its purest form, the federal bureaucracy works best when tackling well-defined, compartmented tasks that can fit into nice, neat organizational boxes. In contrast, dealing with today’s bureaucracy-spanning, interagency, intergovernmental, and even international challenges is something it is not well-organized to do. That’s why presidents have found it necessary to appoint czars. They fill a gap that the federal bureaucracy (and its mirror image on Capitol Hill) cannot, at least as currently configured. Those twin bureaucracies just don’t deal very well with cross-cutting crises. 

Such crises—and there are plenty of them—range from exigent emergencies like Covid-19 to longer term endemic problems such as climate change and relations with China. By definition, no one agency, no one level of government, no single sector of our economy—nor, in many cases, even one nation-state—can address these challenges alone. At the very least, they involve multiple agencies and levels of government, non-profits, and the private sector. These institutions must all work together in coordinated, collaborative fashion to successfully meet a particular challenge. But they don’t, at least not naturally. So, presidents have had to create czars.

But czars alone are not enough. These challenges also require career leaders—samurai bureaucrats who have been developed to deal with whole-of-government and whole-of-nation challenges. Yet, for the most part, we still promote, train, and deploy members of the Senior Executive Service the old-fashioned way, to be technocrats at the apex of an agency-centric hierarchy who will preside over programmatically or functionally specialized bureaucratic compartments.

Enterprise Leadership

It has become abundantly clear that today’s challenges can no longer be tackled in isolation by the structures that have so long characterized our vast bureaucracy. The good news is that we have the potential to create an SES that has the potential to deal far more effectively with the issues and emergencies that Americans expect the federal government to handle.

The Federal Executive Institute has a program called Leading Edge that can help. It was designed around the concept of enterprise leadership, a principle that focuses on mobilizing and coordinating the entire interconnected network of government (and non-government) institutions to deal with a particular challenge.

Leading Edge was conceived during the Obama administration by Scott Gould when he was deputy secretary at the Veterans Affairs Department. He worked in partnership with current White House Chief of Staff Jeff Zients, who was then deputy director for management at the Office of Management and Budget. Leading Edge was intended to develop the kind of enterprise leadership competencies that tend to be found in czars, such as those demonstrated by Ron Klain, the departing White House chief of staff. As the Obama administration’s designated Ebola czar, Klain integrated disparate and uncoordinated federal, state, local and non-profit efforts to ameliorate that plague, and those competencies can serve as a model for us.

An Unrealized Vision

One might argue that this is implicit in the SES’s original premise. It was envisioned as a corps of career executives who would apply their leadership skills across government and bring, along with their tradecraft, an enterprise mindset. But that perspective remains the most elusive among the various dimensions of the career executive’s roles. And to compound the problem, Leading Edge—specifically designed to cure this defect—has fallen into funding limbo. It is now a minor, under-resourced, fringe program instead of what it could be.

Fully funding—indeed, expanding—Leading Edge and making it a part of the Federal Executive Institute’s core curriculum would help develop an enterprise leadership perspective. But as long as career executives are considered agency assets, rather than governmentwide or even national ones, that won’t happen.

However, there are ways to change that. For example, the intelligence community’s pioneering civilian joint duty program, (patterned after the military’s general officer development system) requires enterprise leadership as a sixth executive core qualification. It can only be met with an interagency (or equivalent) assignment. So, it’s a precondition to senior executive promotion.

Such initiatives have the potential to help develop executives who can successfully connect the governmentwide dots without sacrificing the technical, programmatic and organizational competencies that today’s executive core qualifications are designed to ensure. But until we acknowledge the need for new cross-cutting leadership competencies, we’ll continue to need the czars.

Ron Sanders, a fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration, is a retired career member of the Senior Executive Service. He served as director of civilian personnel at the Defense Department, the IRS’s chief human resources officer, associate director of the Office of Personnel Management, chief human capital officer for the intelligence community, and chairman of the Federal Salary Council. He has supported the Leading Edge program and is a frequent lecturer at the Federal Executive Institute.